The end of the year

2016 has not been the best of years - that is generally agreed. The Middle East has been really bad - I recall visiting Syria a few years ago, as shown in some of the first blogs here.  The people were friendly and good looking, the food was great, and Aleppo was an exciting city in the midst of rejuvenation. And Israel has seen fit to use the nearby chaos to grab some more Palestinian territory, potentially adding more fuel to the fire.

And then there have been the political shocks. Britain's decision to leave the European Union was the first. I started out thinking it was a good idea as I learned more about the Union and the gross bureaucracy in Brussels, but as the vote drew near, I changed my mind because of the implications of leaving. Then there was the US Presidency, and amazement that the system could not find candidates of real calibre. The final choice is "interesting", and it remains to be seen if his obvious deficiencies will be overcome by the expertise of his support team. The one ray of light for me is what I would call greater realism about environmental issues. It is just not true that we face catastrophe from more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and policies designed to save us from the putative disaster are very expensive and most unlikely to have any detectable effect. 

Then in South Africa there has been the growing dysfunction brought about by corruption. The Gupta saga just grows and grows. Zuma should no longer be president - I can no longer refer to him as President Zuma, because he does not deserve the honorific. The longer he stays, the greater is the damage to the ANC, which is the only good side of the story. The local elections this year gave early warning that the next national election is likely to see the ANC majority slashed. The local elections also have given the DA the opportunity show that it really can govern.  The accounts for 2015 tell the true tale - in the Western Cape, under the DA, some R30 million was poorly spent or went missing; in Gauteng, under the ANC, the figure was R4.5 billion. To put that in perspective, Gauteng lost the Western Cape's annual loss every two days! 

But there are rays of light in the world. One of them is the war on poverty. As Johan Norberg wrote in a recent issue of Sp!ked "At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, the world’s countries set the goal of halving the 1990 incidence of extreme poverty by 2015. This was met five years ahead of the deadline. And even though the world population grew by more than two billion between 1990 and 2015, the number of people who live in extreme poverty was reduced by more than 1.25 billion people." Today, slightly fewer people live in extreme poverty than in 1870, in spite of the massive increase in population. 

Linked to less poverty is a growth in energy consumption.  I have a serious paper being reviewed, which links energy consumption to life expectancy. Below a certain level of per capita energy use, life expectancy at birth is less than 50 years; above about four times that consumption, life expectancy is over 70.  So if you want, for example, India to start cutting its carbon dioxide emissions, you are in effect asking many of their population to accept an early death. I don't think all the agreements in Paris or elsewhere are going to work.

At the other end of the scale, of course, is the phenomenon of the super rich. They are not many in number, but they hold an inordinate proportion of the world's wealth. Great is the gnashing of teeth over their very existence. Yet ultimately wealth is not a moral issue - it is merely the provision of opportunities.  There are only so many things an individual can accomplish, so many meals a day s/he can eat, so many guests on so many superyachts, and then - -? After that, what you do can be good or bad, which is where the morality comes in. And by and large the super rich try to do good - the Gates Foundation, the Rhodes Trust, the numerous Carnegie philanthropies are part of a long history. To me, it is obvious that their spending must trickle down - or where else must the funds have been found to lift millions out of extreme poverty?

There is great fixation on the Gini Coefficient, a ratio between the richest and poorest fractions of the population. South Africa is regularly cited as being really bad, but if you take our 18 million on social support into account, we are perfectly normal. One study I made this year looked at drivers for Gini. I couldn't find any, but there was a slight preponderance of openly socialist societies at the lower end of the Gini's, and rather more capitalists at the higher end. But there were socialists at the higher end, too, and capitalists at the lower. There is insufficient Gini data to show how it changes over time, but the reduction in poverty must surely mean a lowering. I can only conclude that we should worry unduly about differences in wealth - making sure everyone has enough is more important. 

So for 2017 I wish for a growing economy, both locally and globally. 2016 has been a real bad year; 2017 can only be better.

 

The dangers of television

I rarely watch television.  We have a set at home. Once I tried to turn it on and failed.  I told my wife.  She said "Oh! I tried it three weeks ago and it didn't seem to be working then." It was repaired, but still gets little use.

When there was excitement about the State of the Nation Address, a friend, knowing of my telephobia, kindly invited me to join him and a political friend in observing the great ceremony. We sipped generous gins-and-tonic as we steeled ourselves for the event, and tried to get enthusiastic as the cameras showed dignitaries strolling self-consciously up the red carpet.  Finally the State President arrived in a very ordinary-looking van with what I presume were bullet-proof windows. After all the fancy black cars and 4x4s, it was something of a shock to see the presidential carriage so apparently modest.

Inside Parliament, there was a measure of chaos.  Various factions were chanting away -"Pay back the money" - "We love Zuma" - "Bring back the signal." The last became the operative call for a while, until the Speaker told Parliament's Secretary to turn off the jamming device and allow Members to talk to the outside world.

Finally, the State President rose to speak.  Soon, he was interrupted by an Economic Freedom Front speaker, asking a question in terms of one of the rules of the House.  The Speaker did not respond with a ruling on the rule, she merely informed him that the question was inadmissible.  This brought the leader of the EFF to his feet, to object to the effect that the rule cited by his fellow allowed a question, and that the Speaker's response was wrong.  Things soon got out of hand, with the Speaker ordering the Black Rod to escort the two EFF members from the House, them refusing to go (which was, in point of fact, breaking a rule of Parliament, to leave when so ordered by the Speaker) and the Speaker then calling in security to enforce her ruling - and the screen went blank, the goons stormed in, the whole of the EFF was bundled out, Zuma sat roaring with laughter at the spectacle, and the screen returned. (I later watched a video taken from the public gallery to find out what actually happened when the broadcast was censored).

Thus to the first real question - why was the whole of the EFF group removed?  The Speaker had only called on two of its members to leave. The remainder had every right to be there.  

When proceedings resumed, members of the Democratic Alliance were on their feet.  Who were these goons? Were they members of the police?  Neither the Speaker nor the Secretary of the Council of Provinces (who was joint chair of the meeting) would answer the direct question.  Finally the Secretary said she could not tell from where she sat whether or not they were police, and that was enough for the DA to walk out, joined by some other parties.  

Thus to the second real question - what were the police doing in the House, as seems most likely?  The police force is part of the executive arm of government, and have no place in the legislature.

The affair got under way again, this time with a half-empty house.  A member rose - Chief Mangosuthu Buthulezi, leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party, and he was allowed to make a rather rambling speech about what had happened being a disgrace.  The remaining members cheered, but was Buthulezi criticising the behaviour of the opposition or that of the government?  What he said could easily have applied to the latter.

Finally Zuma was allowed to finish his address.  He stumbled badly along the way, at one stage reading "1" as "I" before realizing his mistake.  Throughout he smiled and joked, and given the seriousness of what had just happened, I came to the conclusion that he must have been taking some form of tranquillizer.  Only a "happy pill" could have produced such a reaction in such awful circumstances.

Afterwards, I watched an interview with the leadership of the DA.  The most telling comments came from that latter-day Margaret Thatcher, our own Helen Zille.  The rules of the House had been broken in ways that showed clearly that the executive had absolutely no respect for democratic institutions. Others had broken the rules, too, but this did not excuse the executive for its breaches of the constitution.  If you wanted to seek the origin of the executive's intransigence, you need look no further than the president, who had broken rule after rule in his pursuit of power. The nation is clearly in a very bad state.

I did not sleep happily that evening. It comes from watching too much television.